Huggable: Impact of embodiment on promoting verbal and physical engagement for young pediatric inpatients

Children and their parents may undergo challenging experiences when admitted for in-patient care at pediatric hospitals. While most pediatric hospitals make an effort to provide socio-emotional support for patients and their families during care, such as with child life services, gaps still exist between professional resource supply and patient demand. There is an opportunity to apply interactive companion-like technologies as a way to augment and extend professional care teams. To explore the opportunity of social robots to augment child life services, we performed a randomized clinical trial at a local pediatric hospital to investigate how three different companion-like interventions (a plush toy, a virtual character on a screen, and a social robot) affected child-patients physical activity and social engagement - both linked to positive patient outcomes. We recorded video of patients, families and a certified child life specialist with each intervention to gather behavioral data. Our results suggest that children are the most physically and verbally engaged when interacting with the physically co-present social robot over time than the other two interventions. A post-study interview with child life specialists reveals their perspective on potential opportunities for social robots (and other companion-like interventions) to assist them with providing education, diversion, and companionship in the pediatric inpatient care context.